He tells about one of his students who, though caring to extreme about the plight of poor people in the world, nevertheless, chose to go to work on Wall Street when he graduated. His reasoning was that he could help the most poverty stricken by dedicating a large amount of his considerable salary to helping them rather than going to work as a volunteer working directly with them in Africa, for instance.

A huge amount of money contributed to the right charities would alleviate the conditions of more people than would be helped by a person of meager resources who devoted his working efforts to their cause.

The utilitarian part of me can’t argue with this approach to helping the poor. However, I’m bothered by the fact that this guy went to work for the Evil Empire (pardon my hyperbole) in order to do good for others. This isn’t exactly the Robin Hood approach. Robin Hood didn’t go to work for the devil; he stole from him. To my way of thinking, this is an ethically better approach.

I consider many occupations to be unethical including working on Wall Street. To say that a greater good can be accomplished by taking ill-gotten gains after contributing to an enterprise’s evil activities can’t be justified by saying that, on a utilitarian basis, more good can be accomplished than bad created.

Singer is saying that those who go into teaching because their passion is helping children would do better by going into a profession in which they could earn far more money and then using a portion of that money to help the uneducated. This is pure nonsense. When taken to extremes he justifies the sacrifice of some people for the greater good of saving a larger number.

For example, suppose you were faced with the proposition that you could earn a million dollars by killing someone. With that million dollars you could help 100 poor children escape poverty. Does that justify killing one person? I don’t think so.

Should One’s Life Work Be Ethical?

I consider one’s life work to be something that should be considered from an ethical viewpoint. There are jobs and occupations which, although legal, are, from my viewpoint, unethical. Take, for example, petroleum engineering. There are very high salaries for college graduates in this field and jobs are readily available. But in an age where climate change is being exacerbated by the burning of fossil fuels, I consider it unethical to go to work for the fossil fuel industry.

There are other jobs and professions I consider to be unethical and others that I consider ethical. This is just my own personal assessment. Others would disagree, but I consider working for the military-industrial complex unethical because it supports the war industry instead of putting time and energy and money into the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps.

I consider working in the advertising industry unethical because it exists to convince people to part with their money for the enrichment of corporations while pretending to be concerned about the welfare of the individuals they seek to influence. It promotes “unbridled consumerism” as Pope Francis has said.

The pharmaceutical industry which charges what the market will bear for life-saving drugs is clearly unethical. The drug, called Daraprim, was acquired by a former hedge fund manager. The price was immediately raised to $750 a tablet from $13.50, bringing the annual cost of treatment for some patients to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I consider teaching, care giving, nursing, providing services to the local economy such as those provided by tradesmen or craftsmen to be ethical. Factory farms I consider to be unethical; organic farms I consider to be ethical. I could go on creating two lists: ethical and unethical jobs and occupations, but I won’t.

Other people can make up their own lists. Most Americans would probably consider any legal job or occupation to be ethical. I disagree obviously.

Here is Singer’s very persuasive argument:

I met Matt Wage in 2009 when he took my Practical Ethics class at Princeton University. In the readings relating to global poverty and what we ought to be doing about it, he found an estimate of how much it costs to save the life of one of the millions of children who die each year from diseases that we can prevent or cure. This led him to calculate how many lives he could save, over his lifetime, assuming he earned an average income and donated 10 percent of it to a highly effective organization, such as one providing families with bed nets to prevent malaria, a major killer of children. He discovered that he could, with that level of donation, save about one hundred lives. He thought to himself, “Suppose you see a burning building, and you run through the flames and kick a door open, and let one hundred people out. That would be the greatest moment in your life. And I could do as much good as that!”

Two years later Wage graduated, receiving the Philosophy Department’s prize for the best senior thesis of the year. He was accepted by the University of Oxford for postgraduate study. Many students who major in philosophy dream of an opportunity like that—I know I did—but by then Wage had done a lot of thinking about what career would do the most good. Over many discussions with others, he came to a very different choice: he took a job on Wall Street, working for an arbitrage trading firm. On a higher income, he would be able to give much more, both as a percentage and in dollars, than 10 percent of a professor’s income. One year after graduating, Wage was donating a six-figure sum—roughly half his annual earnings—to highly effective charities. He was on the way to saving a hundred lives, not over his entire career but within the first year or two of his working life and every year thereafter.

Should One Sell His Soul to Wall Street in Order to Do Good?

So Singer apparently considers working for Wall Street a more ethical job than being a professor. I don’t think so. He doesn’t stop to consider the ethically corrupting influence that Wall Street will have on Wage himself who may at any time decide his money will be better spent on his own noncharitable predilections or may decide that selling his soul to Wall Street, even for a good cause, is something he can no longer do.

He doesn’t stop to consider how much evil Wage will be participating in simply by doing his job. He doesn’t consider the corrosive influence that working in a toxic environment will have on Wage’s soul. He doesn’t consider that Wage might not be able to tolerate working in that environment for more than a short time like many young people who went to work on Wall Street right after college. In short, Wage is selling his soul for a mess of pottage, pottage to be sure that he intends to give away to help others, but pottage gained by losing his soul, his humanity and his integrity nevertheless.

Singer’s argument suggests that it’s up to rich people to save the world. In fairness, rich people do a lot of good through their charities. But it’s not an unmitigated good. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has done much good in the world which wouldn’t have been possible without the success of Microsoft Corporation. The Gates Foundation is not without controversy, however, including their support for GMOs and charter (privatized) schools. Gates and other rich people who have gotten rich off of technology naturally feel that there’s a technological solution for every problem.

So is it up to billionaires to do the most good in the world because they possess the most resources? We also must consider that not all billionaires are up to doing good with their money. Many of them use their considerable resources, instead of helping people, to maintain a system of oppression over people, lest those people take their resources away from them. That’s why we can’t trust that billionaires are going to save the world. Many of them are up to making it worse, particularly the plight of the least well off.

As H.L. Mencken writes, “The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve.” While some philanthropists support good causes (like Bloomberg’s fight against Big Tobacco), other pet causes are not so humanitarian. While we may applaud the work of Bill Gates, many philanthrocapitalists, like the Adelsons and the Kochs, have decided that their philanthropic venture will be empowering the Ted Cruzes of the world to wreak havoc. Wealth is power, and concentrated wealth is concentrated power. The most benevolent inventions are also the cruelest.

A better approach might be to limit the economic power that can be accumulated by corporations which then ends up in individual hands. Some billionaires do a lot of good in the world; some do bad, but not everyone can be a billionaire. Everyone can aspire to working in an ethical job or occupation. A system that results in the accumulation of economic power by the 1%, no matter how much resultant good comes with it, is not ethical especially when that means that the plight of the lower classes worsens from year to year. A good society would distribute economic well-being more equitably and democratically. Then we all wouldn’t be so dependent on the noblesse oblige of the rich.

Charity is Good But What About Justice?

Some make a distinction between charity and justice. Charity deals with the immediate needs of desperate people. Justice deals with setting things up so that they don’t become desperate in the first place:

Justice directly confronts the challenge of preventing people from ending up in vulnerable situations. What causes over 15 million children in the U.S. to go to bed hungry each night? Why don’t we have universal public health care? Why aren’t public colleges and universities tuition-free like high schools in the U.S. and [colleges in] most western European countries? Why are our public works crumbling and creating unnecessary obstructions for disaster relief (reaching people stranded after hurricanes)?

It is advocacy promoting justice that seeks the prevention of the causes that lead to so much misery, institutional harm, poverty, and the loss of human life and potential. Repairing the wreckage of wars places huge demands on charity. Waging peace and negotiating arms control agreements places huge demands on justice.

Singer says, “Living a minimally acceptable ethical life involves using a substantial part of our spare resources to make the world a better place.” You can’t argue with that, but that applies to everyone in the economic spectrum not just to rich people. And many are so hobbled economically that they don’t have any spare resources. They need an inflow of charitable or societal resources just to make ends meet. They should not be contributing to charity at all.

If society provided more opportunities for people to do good, i.e. by transferring resources from the war machine to the Peace Corps for instance, more people could work in ethical occupations and pull themselves and others out of poverty at the same time. Too often, however, what the American society provides is opportunities to work in unethical occupations which are rewarded handsomely while working in ethical occupations is rewarded minimally or not at all. If the budgets of the military-industrial complex and those of the Peace Corps were transposed, a massive movement of those working in ethical occupations would provide a greater force for good than the combined forces of ethical billionaires.

Reliance on billionaires to do good in the world is a return to feudalism where kings were the only forces for good or bad in the world depending on whether they were enlightened despots like Catherine the Great and Frederick the Great or just plain despots like Ivan the Terrible or Caligula.

We must consider whether a society which creates “opportunities” for some people to become obscenely wealthy, even though they can then supposedly turn around and use their money to do good, is as good a society as one which creates opportunities for most people to work in ethical occupations and do good at the same time.

Singer’s world view is one where everyone is well off and gives to charity without sacrificing any of their own self-interest at all. They needn’t do that because after all they are billionaires and have much more money than they ever could spend on themselves. It’s not the real world. It applies to a small fraction of rich people – those who want to use their money for good purposes. They barely, if at all, offset the rich who use their money to perpetuate bad purposes.

Perhaps Wage will find out that he cannot sacrifice his own soul to gain the world even if he gives half of it away.

In an article in Salon Sean McElwee says : Charity is great, but it won’t bring real change — and worse, it perpetuates the myth that we need the ultra-rich:

Think of the planet’s best human being. Who are you thinking of? Pope Francis? Your parents? Justin Bieber? According to Business Insider, it’s Mark Zuckerberg. Why? Because he’s planning to donate $1 billion (less than 5 percent of his massive fortune) to charity. While it’s certainly welcome, philanthropy is far more insidious than it appears at first sight. It tends to lead to fawning press coverage, but little in the way of good reform. Worse, it perpetuates the myth that society’s problems can be solved by the rich and powerful. …

There’s a very real sense in which it would be hard for Zuckerberg to have done less for the poor. After all, he and his rich Silicon Valley friends regularly use their wealth to lobby for policies that would make them even richer — even if in the guise of social responsibility.

Billionaires Do Not Always Use Their Money for Good Purposes

And that’s the rub. The rich in addition to their charitable endeavors also use their money to perpetuate the system that made them wealthy in the first place even if that system fosters subjugation and oppression for the vast majority. McElwee writes: “In charity, the rich approach the poor not as equal citizens but rather [as] benefactor and serf. It perpetuates a class society, where the poor and middle class are dependent on the wealthy.”

We must also consider the rationale and ethics of a society that makes some people insanely wealthy for inventing things of questionable and even trivial value.

For instance, take Snapchat. Snapchat has made its corporate owners, Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy fabulously wealthy. Using the application, users can take photos, record videos, add text and drawings, and send them to a controlled list of recipients. These sent photographs and videos are known as “Snaps”. Users set a time limit for how long recipients can view their Snaps after which Snapchat claims they will be deleted from the company’s servers.

The main purpose of SnapChat is so users of the application can take pictures of their “junk”, send them out and then not have to worry that a prospective employer might view them. In June 2013, Snapchat raised $60 million in a funding round led by venture-capital firm Institutional Venture Partners.

According to Forbes, Snapchat’s chief executive Evan Spiegel and co-founder Bobby Murphy, have made it to the 2015 Forbes 400 list. Mr. Spiegel, who is 25, is now the youngest billionaire in the world and currently his net worth sums up to $2.1 billion. Don’t tell me that we live in an ethical society when a piece of crap like SnapChat can raise $60 million, make Spiegel a billionaire and poor kids go hungry.

In addition, it turns out that Spiegle didn’t even invent SnapChat. It was invented by former “friend”, Reggie Brown, who was subsequently shut out of the company. This is reminiscent of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg shutting out the Winkelvoss twins, who actually invented Facebook, and later settled with them for $65 million, a large amount to be sure, but not the $35.7 billion Zuckerberg is worth.

Long story short, people screw their friends over huge amounts of money. This is an ethical society when things like this can happen and people can make huge amounts of money for crapola?

On May 9, 2013, Forbes reported that Snapchat photos do not actually disappear and that the images can still be retrieved with minimal technical knowledge after the time limit expires. The Electronic Privacy Information Center consequently filed a complaint against Snapchat with the Federal Trade Commission, stating that Snapchat deceived its customers by leading them to believe that pictures are destroyed within seconds of viewing.

Snapchat eventually settled with the Federal Trade Commission over allegations it deceived users over the amount of personal data it collected and was responsible for a security breach that impacted 4.6 million customers. It will face privacy monitoring for 20 years.

That’s the story in a nutshell. Unethical people making huge sums of money in unethical enterprises while the poor and people striving in ethical professions such as teaching and caregiving starve to death.

Capitalism, especially as it is currently conceived, manifested and practiced, is unethical. Make no mistake about it: capitalism is not some absolute thing-in-itself that has always existed from time immemorial. It is a moving target, continuously being reinvented and updated to advantage the already rich with every new wrinkle that some financial expert can come up with.

In other words, it evolves and not necessarily in benign ways. Its original purpose, to develop pools of money that could be used in enterprises which would benefit society, has long been forgotten. It allows for despoilation of the environment, the granting of huge rewards to insiders who come up with stuff that only degrades the culture and the complete neglect of the kinds of enterprises that are necessary to make peace in the world and build a better and stronger society.

John Lawrence

John Lawrence graduated from Georgia Tech, Stanford and University of California at San Diego. While at UCSD, he was one of the original writer/workers on the San Diego Free Press in the late 1960s. He founded the San Diego Jazz Society in 1984 which had grants from the San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture and presented both local and nationally known jazz artists. John received a Society of Professional Journalists, San Diego chapter, 2014 award. His website is Social Choice and Beyond which exemplifies his interest in Economic Democracy. His book is East West Synthesis. He also blogs at Will Blog For Food. He can be reached at j.c.lawrence@cox.net.

Comments

Capitalism poses another danger to the souls and minds it captures by measuring everything in material terms. Mo’ money is better than a little mo’. A higher rank in the world of dogs eating dogs is the goal. The result of all this counting and measuring is a sense that those who get more ARE more; they’re just better than artists, philosophers, teachers, nurses and people who make things. So, a Peter Singer may find ethical behaviour in the hedging of funds because he measures the doing of good in terms of money, a material measurement.
I wish Peter Singer could have read Voltaire a little more closely. He might have remembered this quote, from the Philosophical Dictionary:
“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

“Others would disagree, but I consider working for the military-industrial complex unethical because it supports the war industry instead of putting time and energy and money into the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps.”

I guess that would me be (civilian GS for the DoD). That being said, the service my command provides is pay and benefits for Navy sailors and their families. My specific job helping sick and injured sailors (whether they were hurt on duty, off duty, or war) navigate through the rather bureaucrat and more often than not inefficient disability evaluation process. Regardless of U.S. foreign policy, I don’t feel what I do is unethical.

Goatskull, I know somebody who is fully disabled from the military, has 3 children and is getting about $4000. a month for life plus free college educations for his children. By the way he was never in combat. I hope you are getting those same benefits for all the people you’re helping. And what about all those disabled vets on the street? Who is getting them $4000. a month? And why should these vets have to negotiate through a bureaucracy to get benefits?

It’s a sick system. Otherwise, all these vets would be getting their benefits, not just those who know how to navigate through the bureaucracy.

Hmmm. While I hear what you’re saying, this “ethical vs. unethical” dichotomy is a little too black and white for me.

The Peace Corp, for example, could be considered very unethical because they promote going into countries and ethno-centrically changing their cultural & socio-economic environment. I’ve had many wonderful Peace Corp friends return feeling as though they have done something unethical.

I had another person say they felt going into the petroleum industry was “unethical” and her professor beg her to do it because that’s exactly what the petroleum industry needed: more ethical people working within the system to change things.

Having a more textured approach to the life daily lived and the life within daily work makes for a much richer dialogue.

Sorry, Barbara, I don’t think the solution is for “ethical” people to go to work in “unethical” professions as Wage did and as Prof. Singer recommends. People that do this are effectively being coopted by the unethical system and are helping to perpetuate it. I’m sure Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein can point to numerous people working at Wall Street who are doing good deeds in their spare time. It just gives them a warm, fuzzy feeling all over.

Playing Devil’s advocate here but I’m gathering Barbara’s point was not ethical people working in unethical occupations to achieve an ethical goal, but that she is disagreeing with you (somewhat at least) that the professions you mentioned are completly unethical in and of themselves.

I rather believe in a certain combination of the capitalistic and socialistic systems. People should be able to make a certain amount of money so they can enjoy the “fruits of their labor’ and basic intelligence but when they make a certain amount {let’s say 2 million a year} and have accumulated a certain amount {let’s say 100 million dollars} the rest should be taxed at a 90% level to help everyone else have a decent standard of living.

You make too much sense, Grace. Allowing people to accumulate billions makes them de facto kings. Our system is creating feudalism all over again but not based on geography. It’s based purely on money.

I’m a social worker. I’ve been active in the effective altruism movement for years, and I give half my salary to the best charities I can find.

I find it offensive that you end with a line about how “people striving in ethical professions such as teaching and caregiving starve to death.” No American teachers or professional caregivers are starving to death. Know who is starving to death? People living in countries with such poor economies that famine is common.

I would love for teachers and helping professionals to be paid more! But I don’t hear solutions in your article – I mostly hear criticism of people who target their help to those who are, for example, starving to death, rather than to Americans who may be in bad situations but not so bad as that.

Julia, Grace, Barbara, Goatskull, we’re living in a complicated world, yes, but let’s be honest about our compromises with a system that for decades now has been scamming us. We’re part of it, not by choice, but by necessity, so let’s get real; call it what it is. America is creating poverty.

Well, Julia, my late wife’s caregiver was paid $10. an hour by the County of San Diego. If you don’t call that starving to death, I don’t know what is.

However, I agree with you that I would rather be a poor person in this country than a middle class person in the Middle East.

I’m all for helping poor people all over the world and not just in the US. That’s why I’m donating for the Syrian refugees. Isn’t that what the Peace Corps does – helps people outside the US? That’s why the article recommends transferring money from the military-industrial complex to the Peace Corps and organizations like it that help poor people all over the world.

Can’t believe the “world’s greatest living philosopher” is shilling such total bullshit.

Born in 1946, Singer should know better than anyone how his generation, the Boomers, each of whom was totally against becoming another “man in the gray flannel suit,” was going to change the world by setting peace, love, and happiness above capitalism and materialism, yet exceeded their parents in selfishness.

My professors in the 1980s heard the same damn argument from their students, that they could do so much more for mankind if they were wealthy bastards rather than simply do-gooding poors.

John Lawrence is absolutely right: the every day temptations once one is rich to behave like the rich drown out the distant call of need and disparity. It happens to organizations also and is called “regulatory capture.”

Finally, the best recent study shows that when they do eventually give up some of their money for charity, the rich give all their money to hospitals and colleges to have buildings and baubles with their names on them, and absolutely nothing for food and clothing for the homeless and others in day-to-day need — and it’s still less money than the 99% give away, http://www.cleveland.com/nation/index.ssf/2014/10/wealthy_americans_give_less_pe.html

Careful there. If you travel anywhere to most places in the world, you know that each and every single American could be construed as unethical because they live better than 99% of the world…. and just about every single resource they use is on the backs of someone living in abject poverty elsewhere in the world. Perhaps you’re suggesting it would be most ethical for most Americans to go back to making $1 an hour (in whatever profession) and give up all their belongings to the poor of other countries?

Perhaps you’ve had a conversation with someone poor living right across the border in Tijuana in a shack and told them that $10,000 per year in income is poverty level in the U.S.? People there think that’s insane. If only they would see $10,000 in their lifetime.

The world is a caste system and, holistically speaking, we Americans are all privileged within it.

Barbara, holistically speaking now, what caste do you belong to? The one defined by the median US income of $51,000? Do you have enough money?
Do you have enough money to go live somewhere other than the shack you’re in now? Can you make the payments on your 3-year-old car and afford the mortgage and a couple nights out a week filling your stomach?
Holistically speaking I think you’ve blown your cover. You’re a troll.

Barbara, you’ve got to do better than this. It’s false to say Americans live better than 99% of the world. It might be true their salaries are higher but among the members of the Organization of Economic Developent and Cooperation we’re 4th in salaries behind Switzerland, Ireland and Luxembourg. Those who have money to travel abroad probably are part of your caste and make much more money than the average wage earner here in the States.
The OECD has the average Mexican salary between $13,000 and $14,000, so you’re not too far wrong when you say a Mexican worker would wonder what’s wrong with your guess at $10,000. But don’t get too proud. The UN ranks America 34th out of 35 for those living in poverty, making us “the poorest country in the developed world.” And only Mexico and Turkey are worse than us in the OECD ranking for inequality of income. So, yes, inequality explains why we’re fourth in the world for average income and have UNICEF’s worst ranking for children living in poverty.
I’m all in for Bernie. Who you going to vote for?

Point well taken, Bob. Let me just say that I absolutely LOVE this article by John precisely because it is fertile ground for so much discussion, especially among differing views held by liberals.

I strongly support John’s assessment of the book and his conclusion that: “A good society would distribute economic well-being more equitably and democratically. Then we all wouldn’t be so dependent on the noblesse oblige of the rich.”

And indeed, I believe that several countries in Europe have already gotten it right and live that way. Socialism works well there, even though it is not without its problems. (In my opinion, many Europeans haven’t even begun to address their problems with racism, for example.)

That said, the article gave me pause on many interesting levels. The first is the dichotomy of “ethical professions vs. unethical professions”. That seemed too pat for me.

What was I thinking about? Physicians in America. Sure, we all get to talk endlessly about the “evil empire” of Wall Street. (It’s become cliche now.) If you dig a little deeper, you’ll find that a very large number of teenage & twenty-something youth want to become physicians and when you ask them honestly why that is, the majority say it’s because they will become wealthy. It’s an adage that most kids go to medical school so they can gain status, prestige and money.

Then they become physicians in America. The American Medical Association represents extremely Republican and conservative ethics. And yet, when physicians do their daily work, they are taking care of the sick. Most people would think that’s noble. Most people haven’t taken a good look at the values of physicians… and that they are actually some of the “cream” of America, not just Zuckerberg. So these are the kinds of layers I’m talking about.

The other issue that came up for me is how this book & John’s commentary fit into a larger international context.

In the South Bay, most of us are immigrants or children of immigrants. Hence, a lot of us have family abroad and spend our time/vacations/money on visiting them. Others of us have to live abroad for our employment. We get to see how the rest of the world lives or has lived.

My own father is a Holocaust survivor –Sachsenhausen Nazi concentration camp at the age of 7 — and then had to return to Stalinist Communist Poland. I remember well visiting my grandmother during Communist times and there being nothing on the shelves to buy and very little in the cupboards to eat. (Some of my family members were also big Solidarity protestors. Only one of my grandmother’s protests against the totalitarian government was that she went into the basement of her local Catholic Church every week with a group of friends and they read literature — the classics. She could have been imprisoned for that… it was a time when atheists were the ones killing and oppressing everyone. A reverse of what we tend to experience both historically and in today’s societies.)

When immigrants come to America and get on a bus in “Anytown USA” or when people have been employed in difficult locations around the world and suddenly return to “Anytown USA”, in my experience, they tend to say: “How can anyone suffer here?”

Many immigrants in my experience then believe that the poor or homeless are just lazy because we have opportunity here. I can’t tell you how many immigrants believe that poverty and problems don’t exist in America.

For the liberal with an immigrant background, to me, fighting for women’s rights, higher minimum wage, better working conditions, and so much more becomes incredibly important because: Well — WE CAN. We get to work harder for a better world. (Elsewhere it wouldn’t be possible.)

I really think the profession you choose is a lot less important than the person you cultivate yourself to be. You’ve got the greedy and scammers and toxic environments all up and down the line.

Mostly, I commented because Goatskull said he works for the DoD and in one brush stroke, it felt like John was saying Goatskull is somehow unethical. Is that really a fair assessment?

Barbara, no I am not saying nor would I say that Goatskull is unethical. I myself once worked for the military-industrial complex. Actually for several different companies associated with it. Maybe that’s why I’m so vehement about it.

I’m so glad and so relieved that I terminated that association 40 years ago. I can understand why good people do it: they never really stopped to think about it, they are really right wing and they’re proud of it, they have families to support and that comes first. I am sure there are valid reasons. When I had a family to support, I put that ahead of my ethical qualms about the MIC.

However, it’s worth thinking about especially for young people starting out in life if their life’s work should have a moral or ethical purpose and not just be about success and “getting ahead.”

Yeah, John, the point that constantly gets lost in all the measurements of rich and poor is that the measurements are of the material and not the spiritual. In more traditional societies, real family values include feeding the kids first, taking care of the family’s disabled and dying, celebrating survival with the neighbours and lending them a hand too, because everyone knows they’re in this stewpot together. Those whom we used to call “disadvantaged” know these truths better than those who aim at wealth and exclusion as their personal marks of success. In other words, the best revenge is to live well, not to live wealthy.
Even good liberals can fall victim to the notion that success is wealth.

Even more disappointing is the spectacle in Roseburg of pro-gun demonstrators telling Obama to go home just a few days after the mass murder there which killed ten people!! Where were the anti-gun demonstrators?

This really tells you where we are in this culture and where we’re headed. If the 2nd Amendment is so damn important to these people, we need to scrap the whole Constitution and start over. This time without a 2nd Amendment!

See Joan Walsh, The Nations National Affairs Correspondent, onn Bernie Sanders and guns. “Though the NRA endorsed him in his first race for Congress, he has a D-minus rating from the group. He supported the 2013 background-check bill, in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, and closing the gun-show sales loophole.”
A lot of people who write journalism have also noted that history.

“Perhaps most abundant are the stories about the race of trolls (Danish: trolde, Swedish/Norwegian: troll). Scandinavian trolls tend to be very big, hairy, stupid, and slow to act. Any human with courage and presence of mind can outwit a troll, and those whose faith is strong can even challenge them to mortal combat. They are said to have a temperament like a bear–which are, incidentally, their favorite pets–good-natured when they are left in peace, and savage when they are teased. Trolls come in many different shapes and forms, and are generally not fair to behold, as they can have as many as nine heads. Trolls live throughout the land, dwelling in mountains, under bridges, and at the bottom of lakes. While the trolls who live in the mountains are very wealthy, hoarding mounds of gold and silver in their cliff dwellings, the most dangerous trolls live in lonely huts in the forest. While few trolls have female trolls, trollkoner, as wives, most possess a regrettable tendency to spirit away beautiful maidens, preferably princesses, who are forced to spin by day and scratch the troll’s head by night.”

I’m tempted to crib Winston Churchill’s old line: “Capitalism is the worst system, except for all the others that have been tried.” Does capitalism have flaws? Yes. Should we work to fix & mitigate those flaws? Yes. But what alternative is being proposed? A command economy? That’s even more oppressive. Until you’ve got a working model of a society that’s functioning with a non-capitalist economy on a large scale, and getting better results for the people who live under it, capitalism is going to remain the worst system except all the others that have been tried.

Why don’t we try another version of capitalism, one in which the rich are taxed at the same rates they were in the Eisenhauer administration (90%) and one in which there is a financial transaction tax like there was in the 1960 version of capitalism.

“Financial Transaction Taxes have been around for hundreds of years. In 1694 an early implementation of a financial transaction tax was released in the form of a stamp duty at the London Stock Exchange. The tax was payable by the buyer of shares for the official stamp on the legal document needed to ratify the purchase. It is the oldest tax still in existence in Great Britain.

“John Maynard Keynes proposed a Financial Transaction Tax in 1936 and advocated the wider use of financial transaction taxes in the wake of the Great Depression.

“Between 1914 and 1966, a securities transfer tax did exist in the United States, with different effective rates for equities and debt, as well as for original issuance and subsequent trading.”

Which version of capitalism do you prefer?

The money so generated could extend and expand social security (a concept that’s been working pretty well in a capitalist environment) or it could pay for free or inexpensive college educations (like I was privileged to get in the capitalist environment of the 1960s) or pay down the national debt or provide Medicare-for-all like most European countries and Canada do. By the way these countries also exist in a capitalist environment last I checked.

Excellent article, Barbara, Europeans are so far ahead of us in so many ways. The American work culture makes it seem alright to exploit laborers since all the others exploit themselves. It also makes it seem OK to make huge amounts of money because after all “they’ve earned it” working nights and weekends.